{"id":217168,"date":"2025-06-26T23:58:10","date_gmt":"2025-06-26T23:58:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/217168\/"},"modified":"2025-06-26T23:58:10","modified_gmt":"2025-06-26T23:58:10","slug":"why-young-people-are-hooking-up-less-than-ever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/217168\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Young People Are Hooking Up Less Than Ever"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cCasual sex can be arranged as efficiently as a burrito delivery from DoorDash.\u201d<\/strong> So why aren\u2019t young people having more sex? And, then, Atul Gawande on R.F.K., Jr.,\u2019s dangerous defunding of global-health programs. Plus:<\/p>\n

\u2022 Meet Elon Musk\u2019s possible replacement at DOGE<\/a>
\u2022 Leonard Peltier\u2019s story isn\u2019t over yet<\/a>
\u2022 A new play fetishizes the British Royal Family<\/a><\/p>\n

There is a hypersexuality to online life, which is largely built around images\u2014and which turns individuals into commodities.Photograph by Lauren Greenfield \/ Institute \/ Fahey Klein Gallery<\/p>\n

Jia Tolentino<\/strong>
A staff writer, covering news and culture since 2016.<\/p>\n

As a certified former young person,<\/strong> my main belief about young people is that they can, should, and, most important, will do whatever the hell they want. This is an especially crucial thing to remember vis-\u00e0-vis subjects such as denim styles, college protests, phone behavior, and sex. Whatever normative thoughts any of us might have about how young people should be fucking\u2014that they should be eagerly experimenting; that they should proceed with maximum caution; that unless they\u2019re cisgender and straight and married they shouldn\u2019t be having sex at all\u2014mostly illuminate our own political beliefs, our own personal constellations of longing and smugness and regret.<\/p>\n

For a piece in this week\u2019s issue<\/a>, I review two books: Carter Sherman\u2019s \u201cThe Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation\u2019s Fight Over Its Future<\/a>\u201d and Louise Perry\u2019s \u201cA New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century<\/a>.\u201d Both were written by women in their early thirties, and both take as their subject the sex lives of Gen Z. Perry, a reactionary British writer in a somewhat radical centrist mold, believes that sexual freedom has gone too far, and that young people ought to reject modernity (kink, dating apps, even partying in mixed company) and embrace tradition (having sex only with people they could see themselves marrying, and only after a nice long wait). Sherman, a progressive journalist, centers her book on the so-called Gen-Z sex recession: the phenomenon of young people having significantly less sex than the generations before them did at their age. Do today\u2019s teen-agers and twentysomethings actually want a more abstinent life, Sherman asks, or are they caught between the numbing hypersexuality of an internet that thrives on personal commodification and the repressive prurience of present-day conservatism, which is more than a decade into its latest campaign to police sex, gender, and reproduction?<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll show my cards here: I think sex is a sort of natural barometer of how welcome we feel in the world. Like Sherman, I want a world in which young people feel free enough to internalize the great lesson contained within sexual congress: that each of us is worthy simply for being a person with desires.<\/p>\n

Read or listen to the story<\/a><\/p>\n

How Bad Is It?<\/p>\n

The U.S. intends to end its financial support for the international vaccine alliance<\/strong>, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., announced this week. (He says the organization, Gavi, \u201cignored the science\u201d in its work immunizing children worldwide.) We spoke with Atul Gawande, a surgeon who writes about medicine and public health for The New Yorker.<\/p>\n

How bad is it?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Gawande:<\/strong> This is extremely bad, which is saying a lot, after the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development<\/a> and the cutting of U.S. funding to the World Health Organization. Kennedy is taking his attack on childhood vaccines global.<\/p>\n

I served as the U.S. representative on the Gavi board when I led global health at U.S.A.I.D. during the last Administration, so I have had a direct view of Gavi\u2019s operations and impact.<\/p>\n

Gavi has lowered the cost of lifesaving vaccines across the world through its negotiations with manufacturers; it has vaccinated a billion children, saving nearly nineteen million lives so far. The U.S. helped found Gavi, and it provides fifteen per cent of its budget. Pulling that funding will mean that seventy-five million children do not receive vaccinations. According to Gavi\u2019s estimates, more than a million are likely to die as a result. Kennedy should bear personal responsibility for these consequences. Furthermore, Gavi\u2019s funding is mandated by Congress and directed to U.S.A.I.D., which is in Secretary of State Marco Rubio\u2019s purview now, not Kennedy\u2019s. So, if neither the G.O.P. nor Rubio acts to stop this inhumane decision, they will also share responsibility for the massive loss of children\u2019s lives. Of all the global health programs cut, this one will likely mean more deaths than any.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cCasual sex can be arranged as efficiently as a burrito delivery from DoorDash.\u201d So why aren\u2019t young people…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":217169,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7708],"tags":[22391,60818,22723,5105,7710,519,448,60819,60817,4715],"class_list":{"0":"post-217168","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-royals","8":"tag-_sensitivecontent","9":"tag-disable-inline-signup-unit","10":"tag-onecolumnnarrow","11":"tag-royal","12":"tag-royal-families","13":"tag-royal-family","14":"tag-royals","15":"tag-textabovecentersmallwithrule","16":"tag-the-daily","17":"tag-web"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114752382747541369","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217168","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217168"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217168\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/217169"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}